06 April 2014 1:30 AM

I told you that David Cameron was a continuation of Blairism by other means. Along with all his other mimicry of the Blair creature, his most striking policy is his determination to continue New Labour’s revolutionary plan to destroy the married family, drive women out of their homes into wage-slavery and abolish the whole concept of the father and husband.

This scheme is always disguised as something else. It always means more State meddling in family life. Usually it is called ‘Equality’. But sometimes it is called ‘Children’s Rights’.

Both these expressions are lies. Women are not more equal, but far worse off thanks to the anti-marriage revolution, as they are increasingly finding.

They must work inside and outside the home, spend endless hours driving from home to day-orphanage to work to hypermarket, and then back again, and see less and less of their children

As for children, their supposed ‘rights’ actually mean ever-increasing power for the State to intervene in their lives. Oddly enough, this never seems to diminish or prevent horrible abuse.

The emotional reaction to the ghastly death of Maria Colwell – a little girl beaten and starved by her stepfather – in 1973 led to the vast increase in State power over the family in the Children Act of 1989.

Yet in 2000 we saw the very similar case of Victoria Climbie, pictured below, and in 2007 that of Peter Connelly (Baby P). There will, I fear, be another such horror before long.

Most of these cases have two effects: calls for ‘something to be done’, and personal attacks on the social workers involved. Both reactions are stupid.

The State is no good at childcare, and nothing will ever make it any good at it. Power and bureaucracy cannot create an ounce of love.

The State’s own care homes are notorious scenes of abuse and chaos, from which many children emerge with their lives already ruined, destined for prison or mental hospital.

We need to accept that we simply cannot make society perfect by passing laws, that people who choose to be evil are skilled at concealing their crimes and scaring away social workers and even the police.

It is time MPs realised that these crimes will happen again, whatever they do.

These schemes sold as safeguards for children are in fact power grabs by the State. Yet we are now told that the Queen’s Speech will contain proposals for a ‘Cinderella Law’ under which parents can be imprisoned for ‘emotional cruelty’.

The chief booster of this Bill is a supposedly Conservative MP called Robert Buckland. When I discussed his plan with him on Radio 2 on Monday, I was amazed at his naivety. As a lawyer and part-time judge, he really should know that vague, subjective laws are the tools of tyrants.

Under such legislation, nobody can ever be sure if he is breaking the law or not. No jury could ever be sure who was telling the truth. But the resulting inquisitions into families – the well-publicised dawn raids, the search and seizure of private possessions, the smears in court that will never wash out – will ruin the lives of any who are arrested, even if they are eventually acquitted. In the old communist countries, the regimes also encouraged denunciations by children, who usually had little idea what would follow.

In Soviet cities, until 1991, there were statues of a little monster called Pavlik Morozov, who turned his own parents in to the secret police for hoarding grain. Schoolchildren would be marched to these shrines of evil and told to revere his memory.

And yet the ‘Conservative’ Party is proposing to write childish denunciation of parents into the law of the land this summer, and the poor Queen will have to recommend this ghastly measure to MPs in her speech in June.

When the Tories said ‘New Labour – New Danger’ back in 1997, they did not know how right they were.

Nor did they, or we, know they would be part of the danger.

Playing a dangerous Game

I am worried by the TV popularity of George R.R. Martin’s clever fantasy Game Of Thrones.

Mr Martin’s imaginary world is frighteningly cruel. The society it describes is far worse than the Middle Ages, because its characters are entirely unrestrained by Christian belief. There’s a lifeless, despised religion but nobody takes it seriously.

I fear it will make those who watch it worse people than they were before.

» I often wish I possessed superpowers, which might allow me to help the people who write to me to recount the horrible things that can so easily happen to you at the hands of authority in modern Britain.

Well, I don’t. But perhaps I am developing them. I was crossing the road on foot at a pelican crossing, protected by a red light, when I saw a cyclist, kitted out for the Tour de France, approaching at speed and plainly not planning to stop. I glared at him from a range of about 20 feet. To my amazement, he immediately toppled over on to his side, hitting the road amid the crunch and tinkle of damaged accessories. I was laughing so much, I had to turn away.

By the time I was able to look back, he was up and moving again, fast enough to catch up with me and call me a rude name. I replied that I hadn’t actually done anything to him and that, while he might be right about how horrible I am, people who ride through pedestrian crossings are even worse. Evildoers beware. I might be nearby.

Nigel the peacemaker

Interesting that Nigel Farage, pictured right, easily won the EU debate against Nick Clegg, despite several attempts to smear him.

I’m familiar with most of these smears, especially the ‘living in the past’ one, always used by people who have run out of arguments.

But in many ways the most interesting thing was that Mr Farage’s opposition to foreign wars didn’t cost him any support, and may have gained him some.

What a good thing that patriotism is no longer linked with mindless support for the drums of war.

It’s the liberals who do that now.

» Why is David Cameron standing by Maria Miller, the pathetic, over-promoted Minister censured for her expenses? Some say it’s because he hasn’t enough women in his Cabinet (enough for what?).

But I think it’s because the Premier is still guilty about his own entirely legal claims for Elite Housing Benefit. Most people still don’t realise how greedily this already rich man milked the system.

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09 September 2013 12:40 PM

I thought it was time for some general comments and responses. First, a small basket of reproaches, perhaps brought on by a near-sleepless night, caused by a BBC experience late on Sunday.

Many months ago I offered Damian Thompson the hospitality of this weblog to make out his case that I am guilty of ‘scaremongering’ over the MMR vaccine, a claim he has repeatedly made, notably in his column in the Daily Telegraph. I deny the accusation. He seemed unwilling to take up the offer, but hinted that he might address it elsewhere. I am still waiting. I think that if he does not make out his case soon, I shall be entitled to believe that he lacks confidence in that case.

More recently, I responded to an attack on me by Ms Charlotte Vere, a would-be Tory MP, who claimed (on the basis of my support for full-time mothers) that I favoured making girls leave school at 14. I rebutted (and in my view refuted) this claim. She replied with a largely unresponsive article, which I posted here as promised, and to which I replied. Since then I have heard nothing but silence from her.

Talking of silence, can any of my readers give me any instance of any of the notable feminist voices of our age having spoken out against (or even commented upon) the CPS refusal to prosecute doctors who offered to abort baby girls, on the grounds of their sex? I am of course against this horror on absolute Christian grounds, in that I regard it is a form of murder, a prohibited act. But surely the anti-sexist sisterhood have their own solid reasons to object to it. Or do they?

As to the incident that kept me awake, it was the BBC’s choice of my old adversary Mehdi Hasan to present the Radio 4 programme ‘What the Papers say’ .

The last time Mr Hasan presented this programme, the BBC apologised on air for the way in which I was treated.

Summed up, the BBC view (upheld by the Trust and not even considered by OFCOM) was that my treatment on the programme (grotesquely caricatured voice, misquotation) was just a ‘mistake’ and had no significance of any sort. So far, my quest for an example of any comparable ‘mistake’ happening to anyone else on WTPS, ever, has come up empty.

After the OFCOM brush-off, I wrote to the BBC saying I would now take up the offer, which they made immediately after the ‘mistake’, to allow me to present ‘What the Papers Say’ , the first time I have been asked to present a Radio 4 programme this century.

I had felt I could not do so while my complaint was still being investigated. But having exhausted all procedures, I felt free to do so now.

I will break a rule here to say that I am at present engaged to present the programme next Sunday evening on BBC Radio 4 at 10.45 pm.

But how about this? So far as I know, and I have been paying fairly close attention, Mr Hasan had not presented the programme since the BBC apology, more than a year ago. I have no idea how presenters are chosen, or on what basis they are rotated. No doubt the choice of Mr Hasan to present the programme last night was entirely fortuitous. But I will leave readers to imagine the thoughts that went through my head when the theme music for the programme was followed by the sound of Mr Hasan announcing himself as presenter.

Some responses to comments. Can rational, intelligent contributors here please *not* try to debate with the fantasists who continue to believe ludicrous conspiracy theories about the terror attack on the Twin Towers on September 11th 2001? These people have lost all contact with reality, will not be persuaded and are only encouraged when normal human beings try to contest this piffle. It is a waste of time for the rest of us, and may well cause a shortage of electrons in the long run.

I assume this contribution from ‘von Journo’ is satirical, and not to be taken literally : ‘The prehistoric classrooms Mr Hitchens refers to, with their terrifying teachers and violations of the pupils' basic rights, appear by modern standards to have been spectacularly unsuccessful. They might well have helped him, "an Olympic-standard maths duffer" to "an O-level in the subject". But In the modern, enlightened system, any duffer can earn a doctorate. Success in education no longer requires the accident of birth of being born clever. The contemporary educational system is much fairer and produces far more graduates.’

Once again the Finnish education system is held up for our delight. Scandinavia (though changing fast thanks to recent mass migration) is often alleged to be a post-Christian, egalitarian paradise by leftist secularists. The reality is slightly different, but there is one very powerful point that needs to be udnerstood here. Finland doesn’t suffer from Britain’s several deep divides, especially our class system, and does not have a legacy of huge, decaying ex-industrial cities where the worst urban conditions are concentrated. It is precisely because of these divides that selection by ability is such an important issue in Britain, and why it is banned by law by our egalitarian political consensus.

Even so, I suspect that measures of educational success in Finland’s schools suffer from the usual problems – the absurd lack of congruence of survey methods in different countries, the readiness of all education systems to judge themselves by more or less subjective outcomes (inspection reports, notoriously subjective, exam results, more concerned with paper qualification than with actual learning, concealed selection either by catchment area or by the encouragement of early leaving by the non-academic, etc etc etc). I would be very grateful for any impartial person with experience of the Finnish system to write in and tell us about it.

Perhaps I could ask ‘Nick’ to elaborate on the argument he offers here : ‘Mr Hitchens has an unerring ability to miss the point on every issue he raises.The problem with immigration is really the problem of welfare and the minimum wage. Without those things the indigenous population would be working and there would be no NHS and government schools and council houses etc for the immigrants to clog up. Problem solved. Unless of course you are a Socialist pretending to be a Conservative in which case you will ignore the issue altogether and distract people with elegantly written nonsense.’

It just so happens that the parties which have encouraged or failed to halt mass immigration are also keen supporters of the welfare state and the NHS, both of which existed before the mass immigration project was launched, and which coudl nto be abolished without the mother of all political upheavals.

I’m not sure that the minimum wage has made all that much difference, though there is no doubt that mass immigration has helped to keep it low without any difficulty. As opponents of the minimum wage pointed out when it was being introduced, it would either be so high that it damaged employment prospects or so low that it made little difference.

The government’s main intervention in wages has been the maze of tax credits, through which it has quietly subsidised low wage employers throughout the country. I have often wondered if this is really permissible under EU competition rules. Or perhaps the EU, like most people, simply haven’t noticed what is going on.

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29 August 2013 12:46 PM

I must confess to having been distracted by our government’s almost unhinged rush to war, which is why I have taken so long to reply to Ms Vere’s contribution.

One correspondent suggests I shouldn’t do so, and I see what he means. I, too have, been tempted to refer to various Peter Simple characters during this exchange, notably Jeremy Cardhouse MP and Dr Heinz Kiosk. Alas, I suspect these references will mystify Ms Vere, who seems uninterested in these hinterland affairs. But I promised to reply, and so I will.

First of all, I must ask Ms Vere on what she bases her assertion that Margaret Thatcher had “a hatred of ‘bring-backery’.” I was an industrial, labour and political reporter during most of the Thatcher era – 1979-1990, though I was abroad or grappling with the Cold War story, during her final years in office. I regularly saw her answer questions in the Commons, from the Gallery, I listened to her conference speeches and more than once I travelled in her aircraft on foreign visits, and was able to sit in conversation with her, with a number of other travelling journalists. I have read John Campbell’s two-volume biography of her. And I confess that, if she ever did express a dislike of ‘bring-backery’, I had not noticed it. I’d be glad of some references.

I always had the strong impression that she in fact wished (whether she achieved this is another matter) to restore a number of things which she believed Britain had lost, including a sound economy, patriotism, rigorous education and national independence. You might well describe these aims as ‘bring-backery’ if you were the sort of person who thinks all motion is forwards, and that forwards is automatically good. I do not think she was such a person. Like many of her generation (which was also my parents’ generation, so well understood by me) she had seen our country decline in many important moral and spiritual aspects, was pained by this and regretted it.

On the other hand, Mr David Cameron has said he likes Britain as it is, and is well known for his dismissal of alleged fruitcakes such as me and my friend Simon Heffer for our ‘bring-backery’, though he chose to call me a ‘maniac’, which I think a larger compliment.

Has she somehow confused Mr Cameron and Lady Thatcher? Or has she recreated Margaret Thatcher in her own ‘modern’ image?

In any case, as my more regular readers have pointed out to her, the words ‘Margaret Thatcher’ are not a magic incantation here. I am not a Thatcherite and regard her as a failure, and indeed as someone who never even attempted to reverse the Left’s moral and cultural revolution, though sometimes giving the impression she was, and certainly regretting, for instance, her failure to save the grammar schools.

I think Ms Vere’s obvious ignorance of my political position (which wouldn’t matter if she hadn’t chosen to tweet her baseless jibe about school-leaving) just shows that she is uninterested in ideas. It takes about five minutes on the web to find out what my positions are on most major subjects. That sort of dismissal of ideas is common among businessmen or businesswomen, though in my view unwise. But can it be excusable in someone who seeks to be a member of Parliament? I think not. She should at least know what it is she disagreeing with.

As for the ‘A’ list, as Ms Vere presumably knows, there was never any definitive written list that was published. If she has a copy, I should be glad to see it. But in September 2009, Jonathan Oliver wrote in the ‘Sunday Times’ that ‘The Sunday Times can disclose the eclectic mix of candidates who answered the Conservative leader's appeal for people with no previous involvement in politics to stand for parliament.

‘The 70 names who have recently been added to the approved list of Tory candidates include Rory Stewart, a Harvard professor who set up a charity in Afghanistan and once taught the princes William and Harry.

‘Other would-be MPs include Merryn Myatt, a businesswoman who presented a BBC consumer show, and Colonel Bob Stewart, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for gallantry in Bosnia.

‘The list also includes the Nigerian-born Nini Adetuberu, 29, who helps drug addicts in north London, and Charlotte Vere, chief executive of a charity helping people with mental health problems. Both women are the personification of Cameron's ideal of "caring conservatism".’

I can find no record of Ms Vere complaining about this description at the time.

She then says ‘you bandied the term around as a primary school child might say ‘she smells’; as a term of shame,’

Did I? I think not. I merely said she was ‘one of the fabled A-listers’.

She then adds : ‘…but I am not ashamed. What on earth is wrong in opening up politics to people who are not policy wonks or who haven’t cut their teeth as a Special Adviser to a government minister?’

To which I reply, nothing at all. I deplore the takeover of politics by these cloned, interchangeable careerists, among whom I number the present Prime Minister, her admired leader. Does she disapprove of his path to power?

She then adds: ‘ What on earth is wrong in encouraging those of us who have started businesses, run organisations and frankly know and understand what life is like outside the Westminster bubble? Is this somehow not Conservative?’

To which I reply, that it is not conservative, if the people involved do not have conservative opinions.

It is not conservative if they are instead conscious or unconscious bearers of conventional wisdom, socially and politically liberal, entirely at ease with mass divorce, rigour-free education, radical ultra-feminism, pandemic abortion, state subsidies for fatherless families, uncontrolled mass immigration, destruction of national sovereignty through the EU, and official multiculturalism. Not to mention the increasing invasion of private and family life by the state and by commerce, and the parcelling out of children to misnamed ‘care’ while their actual parents are pressured to abandon them while they do paid work.

The opinions of MPs and candidates are, in my view, decisive. This is not a parish council we are electing, but an allegedly sovereign Parliament, and an adversarial one at that.

Note that I do not use the capital ‘C’. The Conservative Party is now a party of the Left in all but name. It didn’t intend to become one, but it did become one, by failing to understand, challenge or reverse the Left’s programme of cultural and moral change begun by the Fabians and then redoubled by Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins, before merging with Marxist and Gramscian social thought in New Labour – itself the direct heir of ‘Euro-Communism’ and the journal ‘Marxism Today’. It is the purpose of my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’, to explain the shape of the modern left, and to explain that it has chosen a new route to Utopia, having acknowledged the failure of Bolshevism and of the 1945 statist experiment in Britain.

The Tories, who sought office rather than power, repeatedly compromised with these currents, until they found themselves governing along lines prescribed by the Left. The Tory Party’s broad acceptance of the openly egalitarian and politically-correct Equality Bill (mentioned below) is the single most striking feature of this process. But the Tory Party’s acceptance of comprehensive state education (Labour’s *real* Clause Four, its unalterable equality-of-outcome Holy Grail) is just as striking. This is why ideas matter, why their origins matter and why their history matters.

To respond to any mention of ideas with a yawn is to invite other people’s ideas to fly into your head through the wide and gaping entrance you have provided for them.

My main task in life is to point out this fact, that the Tory Party has gone over to the Left and is no longer in any way the friend of conservative, patriotic people. It never was much. It certainly isn’t now.

I responded to Ms Vere’s still unwithdrawn false allegation against me because I saw an opportunity to examine, in her, the force and mind of the modern Tory Party. The baseless charge she made against me could equally well have come from any Guardian-reading tweeter or ‘Comment is Free’ warrior.

That is why I suspect she is, unconsciously, an apostle of the beliefs which inform the BBC, the academy, the C of E hierarchy and the major parties. These beliefs are not in any way conservative. For such people, the function of the Tory party is to provide parliamentary representation and office for people whose tribal loyalties and social backgrounds keep them out of the Labour or Liberal Democrat Parties. They embrace policies to obtain office, rather than seeking office to implement policies. They have no principles not because they are unprincipled or wicked, but because they see no point in principles, and do not really understand why anyone should have any.

That is why I quoted Maynard Keynes on the way that ‘practical’ people who profess to be uninterested in theories are usually the slaves of some defunct economist, of whom they have never heard. Just as many people don’t even know they’re speaking in prose, many politicians don’t even know that they are guided by an ideology of which they have never heard, and which they have never studied. Such people don’t really choose what they say or think, and indeed make it very difficult for themselves to do so.

If Ms Vere is so opposed to feminism, as she says she is, why does she join and serve a party whose leading female minister, Theresa May, as I often point out, worked co-operatively with Harriet Harman on the Equality Bill and has (see below) publicly embraced the revolutionary idea of all-women shortlists (both these actions before the last election, in which Ms Vere stood in the Tory interest)?

Feminist is as feminist does. In any case, I am myself a feminist, in that I have always supported the rational treatment of women in marriage, property, education, work, the professions and law, and supported the abolition of unjustified barriers to them.

What we are dealing with, when we encounter Harriet Harman , is something entirely different. This is not feminism but a dogmatic pursuit of a gigantic revolution in the relations between the sexes, with enormous consequences for marriage, child-rearing and society.

It is based upon the (to me, extremely strange) idea that the fact that women become pregnant, and men do not, cannot justify any distinctions between men and women, in law, custom or morality. It also includes a belief that women are ‘excluded’ from various parts of our society solely by irrational prejudice - a belief which justifies the imposition of quotas upon employers and others to ensure that women are ‘represented’ in all occupations, trades and professions (well, almost all, my campaign for women to be 50% of all dustcart operatives has never quite taken off).

Mrs May’s adoption of this position was a very significant moment in British politics, (as is usual in such cases) widely ignored. She did so by supporting all-women shortlists for Parliamentary candidates in an interview with the Guardian on 14th December 2009. She had previously said (to the same paper on 10th November 1995, in an interview with Rebecca Smithers, to which I’m unable to provide a link, though perhaps a more adept user of the web might help) ‘I'm totally opposed to Labour's idea of all-women shortlists and I think they are an insult to women. I've competed equally with men in my career, and I have been happy to do so in politics too.’

And you will also find that she makes no attempt to explain it. She does not need to explain it to Ms Orr, who is happy to welcome a new recruit into the Guardian’s world. Mrs May has bent her neck to the new orthodoxy, and they are happy enough with that . But if she claims to be a conservative, she needs to explain her adoption of such a belief to conservatives.

And Ms Vere, the alleged critic of Harriet Harman, needs to explain her allegiance to a party in which such a person is prominent, powerful and praised. She cannot attack Ms Harman and support Mrs May. One or the other. But not both.

Ms Vere says ‘I support strong families who are able to take care of their own, socially and financially.’ But families are not just economic units that take care of their own. They are private places of nurture and independent society, where individuals are free of the state and of commerce, and where tradition, morals, manners, language, stories, lore, legend, poetry and faith are passed on from generation to generation. This cannot happen if the adults and the children are largely parted from their children by the pressures of incessant work outside the home, and when Sunday has been abolished as a religious day of rest and turned into a noisy commercialised zone of retail therapy.

Another reader has pointed out, correctly in my view, the significance of the figures Ms Vere quotes on education. They result from militant, equality-of-outcome feminism (something she claims to oppose) in education.

Ms Vere next says :’We must stop pitting the beleaguered and overworked, paragon-of-virtue stay-at-home mum versus the guilty, uncaring, self-obsessed working mum. Both are ridiculous stereotypes which should be banished. And when people like you, Peter, ‘defend’ or ‘attack’ either of these stereotypes, it encourages a hardening in attitudes.’

Do I? Can I see some examples of my doing this? Who’s doing this pitting? I know perfectly well that few mothers have any choice as to whether they go out to work. I do not condemn them, but I condemn the government, and the other influences that push them into this unwanted fate. Ms Vere should read what I actually say She might then learn what I think. But does she care?

Ms Vere says : ‘Supporting dual income households by making a contribution to childcare costs is a win for the family, and a long term win for our country. All parents probably wish that they had an extended family on their doorstep, but life’s not like that and you find new ways of broadening your net.’

The assumption behind this statement is that there are two options – one that subsidised ’childcare’ is provided, the other that grandparents will step in. But what about the third possibility – that the child’s own mother does the job?

No, families of this kind, despite usually being materially worse off than their modern rivals, must be taxed to support those in which both parents do paid work, and to offer an indirect subsidy to the employers who get the main benefit.

As I’ve said, Mr Osborne will subsidise any form of child care except that done by the child’s own mother. The family which makes a substantial sacrifice to raise its own young is actively penalised, to pay for well off families which prefer money to family life, and also to pay to impose a new and revolutionary way of life on many poor families who would rather hold to the traditional way.

This is an active policy, and if I were of Ms Vere’s persuasion I would call it 'discrimination’. What it certainly is, is a policy to encourage one way of life, and discourage another. I do not think that it could possibly be described as ‘conservative’.

Then there’s this : ‘…we should make sure that by family, we mean dads too. Children need parents – both of them – and the assumption that only the mother can be the care-giver or that dividing caring responsibilities between the both parents is oooh a bit modern, is nonsense. Right from birth, the state, the media and many others inadvertently and unintentionally leave fathers out of the conversation.’

This is, once again, a dogmatic point, coming from the farthest reaches of the Sexual Liberation Front, and its claim that men and women are interchangeable. If any father wishes, or has, to be the principal carer, good luck to him. Some have to. General Boris Gromov, of the Soviet Army, who successfully led that army’s ordered retreat from Afghanistan, was a fine father to his children, of necessity, after his wife died. No doubt there are individuals who find this both congenial and good, just as there are women who would rather drive a tank, fight fires or run a corporation than nurture the young. I wouldn’t stand in their way.

But most of us, as we voyage through life, have noticed that men are different from women, and that the generality of men are not as well-equipped, temperamentally and in other ways, to raise children, especially small children, as are the generality of women. It is a sign of the unhinged nature of modern Britain that such a statement of the obvious should need to be made. You might wish to alter this, and you would be entitled to your opinion. But to do so you must embark on a revolution. Why would a conservative pursue such an aim?

Finally, I’ll respond to this : ‘…parents in dual-income households take care of their children too! They do phonics, ride bicycles, bake cupcakes, go on trips, help with homework etc etc. The assumption that going to work results in a complete abrogation of young-raising responsibility is narrow-minded and frankly offensive.’

I make no such assumption. How could I? The great conscript army of wageslave mothers struggle home nightly to try to win back some of what they have lost in the day, and try mightily to do so. They know what they’re missing. But time once gone, especially quantity time with young children, cannot be brought back – a truth that all parents of all sorts know, as they gaze in amazement at their adult offspring and wonder where the time went and how it all happened so quickly.

It just happens to be my opinion, and that of significant numbers of other parents, notably of the various campaigns for full-time mothers which have over the past dozen years been given the brush-off by the Tories, that the presence of a full-time mother in the home is *better* than the absence of one.

I would expect an avowedly socialist or liberal party to scorn such a view. The thing that interests me is that the party which proclaims itself to be Conservative is on that side as well. Ms Vere is welcome to her funky, radical views, even if she doesn’t know they’re funky and radical. But what business has she standing for Parliament while calling herself a ‘Conservative’? That’s what this is about.

By the way, I have never mentioned the 1950s, and I don’t ’hark back’ to any era. I can remember the 1950s, and there was plenty wrong with them, as I make plain in my book ‘the Abolition of Britain’. I yearn for no ‘golden age’. I just yearn for the good in preference to the bad, at all times and in all places.

Loyalty to tribe seems to me to guide Ms Vere more strongly than interest in ideas, their origin and outcome. That’s why she’s in a party that calls itself conservative and isn’t.

As for me being the ‘arbiter of conservatism’ (I am certainly not the arbiter of Conservatism) , I should have thought the test was to be found elsewhere.

I have much experience of the enemies of conservatism, and much of my view of what it is has been formed by finding out in detail what happens when conservatism, in the form of faith, tradition, patriotism, privacy, liberty, limited government and the rule of law is defeated and cast aside.

Ms Vere thinks this is all dull, irrelevant stuff, bring-backery and ‘harking back to yesteryear’, and other silly jibes that belong in G2, on ‘Woman’s Hour’ or in the New Statesman. But I also look for definitions in history and thought, particularly in Christianity, in the ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ of Edmund Burke, on the voluminous work done by such people as Patricia Morgan on the family, and of John Marks and others on education. I may not be able to define it, nor would I want to. I’ve had enough of ideological politics to last several lifetimes. But I do know what it is not, and I do know who its enemies are.

If a party fails to stand up for the rule of law, embraces egalitarianism, sneers at tradition, weakens the free family, threatens national independence and liberty, destroys good things and replaces them with worse ones, tears up our beloved countryside for gain, engages in sordid jingoism and warmongering, then it is not conservative.

There is no trades descriptions law in British politics, or who knows what would happen? But it is surely morally wrong for this collection of social and moral liberals to stand before the electorate and call themselves by that name.

By the way, I have absolutely no idea what ‘opportunity cost’ has to do with it. It doesn’t sound like a principle, or even a disposition. It sounds like the rattling of a desiccated calculating machine.

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27 August 2013 6:17 PM

Here is Ms Vere's response( also posted as a comment on the previous thread) . I shall respond shortly.

Dear Peter,
Lady Thatcher had a hatred of ‘bring-backery’. I have too. And I think
we can say that your recent blog about women, working and motherhood
(see here) has more than a whiff of bring-backery about it.
Rather than make a point-by-point rebuttal of your piece, which managed
to include the GDR, the USSR and other nods to yesteryear, plus a fair
smattering of less than flattering comments about me personally, I’d
like to offer a more sweeping narrative.

It is true. I stood for the Conservatives in Brighton Pavilion at the
last election. I was a reserve to the shortlist and prevailed over five
good candidates in an Open Primary. I was proud to stand, and it will
remain one of the highlights of my life. But Peter, you seem to think
that I was an ‘A-lister’; not true – to my knowledge anyway – as the A
list significantly pre-dated my involvement as a parliamentary
candidate.

But no matter, you bandied the term around as a primary
school child might say ‘she smells’; as a term of shame, but I am not
ashamed. What on earth is wrong in opening up politics to people who
are not policy wonks or who haven’t cut their teeth as a Special Adviser
to a government minister? What on earth is wrong in encouraging those
of us who have started businesses, run organisations and frankly know
and understand what life is like outside the Westminster bubble? Is
this somehow not Conservative, Peter?

Having fought Brighton and lost, I turned my attention to the Liberal
Democrats. Indeed as the Finance Director and a spokesperson for NO2AV I
battled against the unholy alliance of Labour, LibDems and UKIP to
roundly reject the imposition of a voting system used only in Australia,
Fiji and Papua … you will remember the phrase. Is what I did not
Conservative, Peter?

And then I turned my attention to women. More specifically, women in
the economy. For many years, Conservatives and conservatives haven’t
felt comfortable talking about women. Labour and the left have had the
crutch of feminism, and they are welcome to it in my view. Harman and
the like queue up to portray women as ‘special creatures’ and demand
positive discrimination to bypass democratic and meritocratic processes
and shoehorn the favour few into positions of power. Not in my name.

And as I read around the topic I was relieved that the VAST majority of
women reject feminism too. It doesn’t speak for women of today, it
doesn’t resonate with them and it has no time for the views of men.
So how can we think about women today? It is a brave new world where
the prejudices and expectations of just a generation ago seem dated, for
example:
Young women far exceed the number of men applying to university: indeed
if every young man that applied was given a golden ticket conferring
automatic entry there would still be more women than men.
Women under the age of 29 earn more than men: and for most men and women
this is neither ‘good’, not ‘bad’, it just is.
One in three working mothers is the main breadwinner: this fact alone
highlights the enormous contribution to family income from working
mothers.
So we do have to approach the issue in a new way.

The concept of
choice, a key Conservative value, aligned with responsibility, must be
part of the conversation. How do we say to a mum OR a dad that in this
brave new world of women and men receiving the same opportunities and
the same education that they have choices? And how do we explain that
as with all choices, there are consequences.

So here, Peter, is my plan for the family:
Most importantly, we have to stop ganging up on each other. We must
stop pitting the beleaguered and overworked, paragon-of-virtue
stay-at-home mum versus the guilty, uncaring, self-obsessed working mum.
Both are ridiculous stereotypes which should be banished. And when
people like you, Peter, ‘defend’ or ‘attack’ either of these
stereotypes, it encourages a hardening in attitudes.
Secondly, we should make sure that by family, we mean dads too.
Children need parents – both of them – and the assumption that only the
mother can be the care-giver or that dividing caring responsibilities
between the both parents is oooh a bit modern, is nonsense. Right from
birth, the state, the media and many others inadvertently and
unintentionally leave fathers out of the conversation.

That must
change, children and families are their responsibility too.
Thirdly, we should recognise that those women and men who choose to stay
at home have the absolute right to do so. As with all decisions
relating to the family, parents must make the right choice for their
circumstances and we must trust them to recognise the pros and cons of
their chosen path, some of which are decades away.
Fourthly, in a statement of the bleeding-obvious, we should recognise
that parents in dual-income households take care of their children too!
They do phonics, ride bicycles, bake cupcakes, go on trips, help with
homework etc etc. The assumption that going to work results in a
complete abrogation of young-raising responsibility is narrow-minded and
frankly offensive.

Supporting dual income households by making a contribution to childcare
costs is a win for the family, and a long term win for our country. All
parents probably wish that they had an extended family on their
doorstep, but life’s not like that and you find new ways of broadening
your net.

Finally, you are right Peter, strong families are at the core of our
nation’s social fabric, so why can’t they be at the core of our nation’s
financial fabric too? As a Conservative, I support strong families who
are able to take care of their own, socially and financially.
What started out as a diverting summer holiday outing on Twitter has
grown into you, a leading journalist, publishing, well, something that
took my breath away.

Aside from the personal digs, Peter, you felt able
to become the arbiter of Conservatism and question my political values.
But I am OK with that. The Daily Telegraph once called me a ‘feisty
Tory’ and, although I have a very ample soft side, I think I will cope.
And I will continue to debate this topic which makes so many
uncomfortable because the landscape is shifting so rapidly and we have a
new generation of parents to serve. Many on the right might benefit
from going back to first principles of true equality, individual and
social responsibility and choice. The concept of women being encouraged
to stay at home building ‘domestic fortresses’ is pure Lady Thatcher
bring-backery, Peter, and you and others need to find a voice for the
world we live in now.
With very best wishes,
Charlotte Vere

A Conservative PS: you will recognise that at the heart of my argument is the
‘opportunity cost’ of stasis and inaction. You will also understand
that ‘opportunity cost’ is what differentiates my views from those of
feminism.

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26 August 2013 5:16 PM

Any minute now I expect a contribution here from Charlotte Vere, which I will post prominently and at length, and then (I hope) reply to. Why? Who is she? Well, she has grabbed my attention and I thought a full-scale debate here would be better than any more Twitter exchanges, however pithy.

Ms Vere and I have had a squabble on Twitter, which she began by claiming, on the basis of no evidence at all, that I thought girls should leave school at 14. I should state here (absurd that it should be necessary) that I don’t think anything of the kind. My views on the education of women (as I have said more than once before) are pretty much those stated by Virginia Woolf in ‘A Room of One’s Own’. What’s more it seems to me that nobody can be too well-educated for the momentous and hugely influential and responsible task of raising the next generation.

The idea that full-time motherhood is a matter of kitchen sinks, scrubbing, and cleaning behind the fridge is a hostile defamation of a vast task of nurturing, teaching, example, moral instruction, protection from danger, patience, constancy, trust and loving discipline, which in each home where it takes place has more power to do real good than almost any paid job you can think of. It is largely thanks to the Greerite and Friedanesque disdain for this noble occupation, and our culture’s unceasing slandering of it, that the Chief Rabbi feels the need to complain about a society without trust.

Ms Vere constructed this worse-than-baseless accusation (which she has declined to withdraw) in response to my recent column defending full-time mothers. This pointed out that the one form of childcare the government does not subsidise is care done by the child’s own mother. It also explained why so many families gave up great material benefits (so defying the spirit of the age) to give their children this benefit.

Who is Charlotte Vere? Well, by her own description (if I’ve fathomed the rather odd punctuation of her Twitter biography) she ‘s executive director of the Girls’ Schools Association, on the Development Board of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, and ‘Trustee of something she refers to as the ‘Fatherhood Institute & NYAT’. Or, as she displays it : ‘Exec Director | Girls' Schools Association, Dev Board | Oxford Mindfulness Ctr, Trustee | Fatherhood Inst & NYAT and VC of Governors. Tweets own, obvs.’

Obvs.

Make what you will of all that. I do. But what interests me more about her is that in May 2010 she stood as Tory candidate for Brighton, one of the fabled ‘A- listers’. She came third in the general election behind Caroline Lucas (apologies for getting this name wrong and thanks to the reader who pointed it out) , then leader of the Green Party, and the Labour candidate. She was picked as Tory candidate in a very close vote in an ‘open primary’, though the actual votes were never revealed. Just 80 people attended the selection meeting. It sounds like an interesting evening, with a cliff-hanger ending.

Well, it’s hard to define a Tory these days (look at Louise Bagshawe, as was, now Louise Mensch, the woman who wandered in and out of New Labour before becoming Tory candidate for Corby, winning the seat and then wandering off again, who knows whither, in mid-Parliament).

But in what way is she a conservative?

Let’s take a look at some of our exchanges:

She assumed (why? She claims not to be statist) that my article was a plea for state subsidies for full-time mothers, which it isn’t. I don’t, for instance, favour the much-dangled plan for a marriage tax allowance, believing it to be a silly gimmick.

My column was just a plea for the government to stop penalising full-time mothers by a) acting as if they’re a stupid nuisance, a feeling actually voiced by Patricia Hewitt (who said they were a ‘problem’) but implicitly endorsed by the policies of all modern British governments for some years, and b) taxing such families to subsidise child-care for double-earners. And on top of that taxing such families to subsidise the many thousands of fatherless families created by 50 years of deliberate state policy. I want the state to stop encouraging rivals to the independent ,free, married family, and to stop making those free families pay for that encouragement. That’s all.

It was also pointing out that the present government’s attitude towards women who raised their own children was strikingly similar to that of the old East Germany (I quoted from one of my favourite possessions, a propaganda booklet on the GDR in which that horrible state boasted of its advanced and enlightened policy of cramming women into wageslave workplaces, and simultaneously cramming their children into nurseries. The GDR, by the way, had a Tory Party (Christian Democrats) and a Liberal Democrat Party, each allowed 52 seats in the 500-seat People’s Chamber, provided they agreed with the Communist Party about everything. Remind you of anything? It also had universal comprehensive schools.

I had also noticed that the old USSR had a very similar policy. In fact, when I lived in Soviet Moscow, this arrangement – under which a single income simply couldn’t meet the budget of a normal household, and there was universal ‘childcare’ so that mothers of young children could be marched into paid work as soon as possible after giving birth, was one of the most striking features of that society. So was mass abortion (abortions –openly practised as a form of contraception - outnumbered live births in many years in the USSR) and pandemic divorce. When I returned home a few years later, I was struck (and remain struck) by the similarities between this horrible travesty of a human society and the grisly, family-free, privacy free, marriage-free abortionist utopia we are now building in Britain.

The intensifying battle between the state and the family (also dealt with in Ferdinand Mount’s work ‘The Subversive family’) was one of the chief themes of my book ‘the Abolition of Britain’, which I am still hoping some of my critics will one day read, rather than assuming wrongly that it is a tract about central heating..

(If Ms Vere won’t read my book, surely she can read Ferdinand Mount’s, as David Cameron’s mother is Ferdy’s cousin (Ferdy is really Sir William Mount, Bart, but is too nice to mention it ))

Of course the point is this – that the state and the family are rivals. In this struggle, any conservative must surely be on the side of the family and private life (and of private property) against the state. But for those people who confuse economic liberalism with conservatism, there is a confusing new element. The state has now been joined by a ferocious ally, namely global, corporate business, which – as the cleverer Marxists have long realised - has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary forces known to man. Both the state and the corporations dislike the close-knit married family. Such a family requires a proper weekly Sabbath of some kind, where both parents stay away from work and the family is together in its own home, undisturbed by work, or commerce, and is in general resistant to regimentation, advertising and demands for long working hours. The state is suspicious and jealous of such privacy. The corporations are jealous of the time which they would rather we spent in the shops or in the workplace.

Business also prefers women workers to men – amongst other things much less likely than men to be unionised (note how many men have ended up unemployed, and indeed unemployable, since the sexual revolution really got under way and the commercial women’s magazines and the popular newspaper agony aunts started spouting the sort of ideas once restricted to ‘Spare Rib’).

This state-family battle, not some forgotten tussle between unions and bosses, or some ancient dead row about nationalisation, is the real clash in our society at the moment. A terrifying alliance of state and commerce is arrayed against the family and is rapidly destroying it. Of course, this alliance cannot see any virtue in the unmeasured benefits of full-time motherhood, as compared to measurable, GDP-enhancing wage-slavery. Nor would it be interested if it could see any such virtue, despite some politicians’ propaganda claims to be concerned with Gross National Happiness or General Wellbeing. These people have no idea how must of the world actually lives.

Individualism and personal autonomy (once known as ‘selfishness’) are major constituencies now, as the post-Christian society takes its grim shape in the second Century of the Self. And individuals, hypnotised by the latest gadget and allowed almost limitless credit to spend, are the ideal consumers, the ideal wageslaves and the ideal passive, compliant citizen in the beehive state.

Many of the advocates of female wageslavery are of course very well-off themselves( I have no idea of Ms Vere’s personal circumstances) and so are spared from almost all its consequences. That’s often why they can’t see any disadvantages in this arrangement.

If all wageslave mothers were Nicola Horlick, or Cherie Blair, or Samantha Cameron, well-paid and rewarded with great status, then the position might be different (though to me there is something sad in a child being brought up by an employee, however wonderful, while that child’s mother goes out to an office) .

But they aren’t. For most of them it’s a grim job in a call-centre or an assembly plant or a shop, while their child competes for attention in a teeming nursery, what I call a day-orphanage. They do it because they have to, not because they want to. If they had the choice, and if the government stopped pushing them into wageslavery, they’d raise their own young, and do it much better.

Here are some quotes from what Ms Vere (who apparently dismisses any discussion of political theory, its origins and nature, or of the importance of ideas an history in political debate) has had to say on this general subject . (As to this attitude I recommend that she notes what Maynard Keynes once said ‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”)

At one stage (14th August), she rather enjoyably said that au pairs cost £20 a week ‘cheaper than after-school club’ – later in some embarrassment raising this figure to £20 a day.

Then she declared that ‘Motherhood does not mean out of work and cleaning behind the fridge’ (13th August)

She tweeted ‘Yawn’ in response to my pointing out the similarities between Britain and the USSR, and also referred to ‘constant harking back to yesteryear’ (when and where was this harking?).

In response to my characterisation of ‘childcare’ as ‘paid strangers’ she said ‘Strangers! You have never used childcare clearly. These people become part of an extended family’ .

She also Tweeted ‘You have given me no hope that you respect a woman’s right to work outside the home’. Once again, I have no idea where she gets this from. I wouldn’t dream of stopping anyone from working outside the home if she wanted to. I just want to stop people being conscripted unwillingly into wageslavery and abandoning her children to the care of paid strangers.

Challenged to withdraw her claim that I want girls to leave school at 14, she did not do so, but repeated it, saying ‘ I still think you would like girls to leave school at 14 to build ‘domestic fortresses’’

She declared ‘A dual-income family’s main goal should be financial resilience.’

And she gave an example of her rhetoric when she said ‘Pro-family? Absolutely. Why does that have to include the women scrubbing the hearth?’ .

Then there was ‘Enough of the ‘bring-backery’ of the Daily Mail . there is a future to seize and 1950s views don’t help’

Most of these sentiments could easily have come from the pen of a radical leftist. Indeed, I have experienced most of them from that direction already. The point here is that they are coming from the pen (or perhaps the hand-held device) of a person who has stood as a Tory parliamentary candidate.

When I pointed out that the Tory party, for which she had stood as an official candidate, had helped the passage of the Equality Act, the central pillar of political correctness and the work (though originating in an EU directive) of Harriet Harman (with whom Ms Vere says she disagrees) , Ms Vere responded by saying Theresa May had ‘little option’ but to go along with Ms Harman’s Equality Bill.

I should have thought Mrs May would have had little option but to oppose it, had she been a conservative. As it happens, she told Ms Harman back in 2008 (Hansard, 26th June 2008 col 501 ) 'I look forward to working constructively with them [the New Labour government]on ensuring that we have workable and practical legislation to provide for a fair society.' Ms Harman responded (Col 503) 'I thank the right honourable lady for her broadwelcome for the package and for our endeavours. I also welcome the fact that she has ignored the cries from her own backbenchers that the proposals are rubbish.’

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05 June 2013 9:43 AM

Some of you have asked if there is a recording of my discussion of the Sexual Revolution with Linda Grant , which took place on Sunday 19th May at the Bristol Festival of Ideas. Here it is.My thanks to Luke Major, who sent me this link:

14 April 2013 2:09 AM

I suspect that Margaret Thatcher would not have much minded the wave of spiteful, immature loathing unleashed among foolish, ill-mannered people by her death.

She knew perfectly well that nothing can be achieved in politics without making enemies, though it is important to make the right ones.

I am not myself a worshipper at the Thatcher Shrine, but anyone who can make foes of Michael Heseltine, the Soviet Communist Party, Arthur Scargill, Left-wing teachers by the thousand, The Guardian newspaper, the Church of England, Jacques Delors, the BBC, Salman Rushdie and Glenda Jackson simply cannot be all bad.

The only thing that would have annoyed her would have been the lazy ignorance of most of her critics (and quite a few of her admirers too). They have not done their homework, as she always did.

They loathe her because of her voice, her old-fashioned manners and style of dress, her hair. They loathe her because she looked as if she lived in a neat, well-tended suburb. They feared her as bad, idle schoolchildren fear a strict teacher.

Many of them, half-educated Marxoid doctrinaires, scorn her out of a pseudo-intellectual snobbery that is the curse of our school system. They think they are cleverer than they are. Few of them know anything about her or her government.

Alas, if they did, the spittle-flecked Left would probably dislike her a good deal less than they do. For her 11 years in office were a tragic failure, if you are a patriotic conservative. She was an active liberal in economic policy, refusing to protect jobs and industries that held communities together.

Was privatisation so wonderful? Personally, I think British Telecom is just as bad – in a different way – as the old Post Office Telephones. The privatisation of electricity, and the resulting dissipation of our nuclear skills, is one of the reasons we will soon be having power cuts. The hurried and mistaken closure of the coal mines is another. Lady Thatcher’s early embrace of Green dogma (repudiated too late) is another.

And this country still has the biggest nationalised industry in the world, the great, over-rated NHS. It also has huge armies of public-sector workers in quangos and town halls – only these days they are condom outreach workers or climate change awareness officers.

At least the old nationalised industries actually dug coal, forged steel and built ships. And at least the old industries provided proper jobs for men, and allowed them to support their families. Young mothers didn’t need to go out to work.

Income tax has certainly fallen. But indirect tax is a cruel burden, and energy costs are oppressive. The ‘Loony Left’ ideas she tried clumsily to fight in local government have now become the enthusiastically held policies of the Tory Party.

As for council house sales, that policy was in the end a huge tax-funded subsidy to the private housing industry, a vast release of money into the housing market that pushed prices up permanently and – once again – broke up settled communities. What’s conservative about that? And why, come to that, didn’t she reward the brave Nottingham and Derby miners, who defied Arthur Scargill, by saving their pits?

She was a passive, defeatist liberal when it came to education, morality and the family. In 11 years she – who owed everything to a grammar education – didn’t reopen a single one of the grammar schools she had allowed to be closed as Ted Heath’s Education Secretary.

She did nothing significant to reverse or slow the advance of the permissive society – especially the State attack on marriage through absurdly easy divorce, and the deliberate subsidies to fatherless households.

She loaded paperwork on to the police, and brought the curse of ambulance-chasing lawyers (and so ‘health and safety’) to this country. She introduced the catastrophic GCSE exam into schools.

In foreign policy, she made a lot of noise, but did little good. It was her diplomacy, and her determination to slash the Royal Navy, that made the Argentinians think they could grab the Falklands. True, she won them back, or rather the fighting services did. But they should never have been lost in the first place

Brave as she was at Brighton, she still began the surrender to the IRA that was completed by Anthony Blair. It was all very well standing firm against the Soviet menace, safely contained behind the Iron Curtain by American tanks and nuclear missiles. It was another thing fighting off the incessant threats to our liberty and independence coming from the EU.

She realised, a few months before she was deposed, how great the European danger was. That, I think, was why she was overthrown by the ‘Conservative’ Party. But for most of her time in office she allowed the EU to seize more and more power over this country and its laws. Had she been as great as she is held to be, we would not be in the terrible mess we are now in, deindustrialised, drugged en masse by dope and antidepressants, demoralised, de-Christianised, bankrupted by deregulated spivs, our criminal justice system an even bigger joke than our State schools and 80 per cent of our laws made abroad.

I will always like her for her deep, proud Englishness, her fighting spirit and her refusal to follow the bleating flock. I despise the snobs and woman-haters who sneered at her and sometimes made me ashamed of my class and my sex. I am proud to be able to say that I actually met her and spoke to her.

But I advise both her enemies and her worshippers to remember that she was human – deserving in the hour of her death to be decently respected, but to be neither despised nor idolised. May she rest in peace.

Putin: The Naked Truth

Alas I can understand what is written on the back of the young woman, fashionably protesting against Vladimir Putin.

It is very rude. Apparently the inscription on her front was even ruder.

I have no doubt Mr Putin deserves this sort of thing (though, to his credit, he doesn’t seem to mind all that much).But why, of all the many equally shady despots and tyrants of the world, is he singled out for it? It is simple. Mr Putin, for all his many faults, is the only major political leader who still holds out for his own nation’s sovereignty and independence.

Left-wingers the world over hate this, as they aim to force us all into a global utopia. If you don’t want that, then Putin is your only hope.

Is the NHS our servant or our master? When Mary Kerswell found that her medical records were full of untruths about her, she asked for a copy (as is her right, and yours) and paid a fee.

When she went to collect her documents, officious receptionists refused to give them to her.

When she in turn refused to leave, the police were called, and of course handcuffed her (they love doing this to 67-year-old women, though they are often hesitant about doing it to 17-year-old louts). They have ‘apologised’. Who cares? We know where we stand.

The BBC is making much of a measles outbreak in Swansea. The implication of much of its reporting is that those media who highlighted concerns about the MMR vaccine in the late Nineties are to blame. Not guilty.

Many parents were genuinely worried, and did not find official reassurances convincing. Why should they, given the track record of Government?

If the authorities had really wanted to avoid this, they should have authorised single measles jabs on the NHS.

Two 15-year-old youths have admitted to manslaughter after robbing an 85-year-old grandmother, Paula Castle, who fell to the ground, hit her head and died the next day.

While she was dying, the pair were busy robbing another woman, aged 75. The prosecutor said the pair ‘simply did not care what happened’ to Mrs Castle.

In fashionable circles, you will be accused of ‘moral panic’ if you think this is worrying or significant, and also told that crime figures are falling. So they are. But crime itself is rising.

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17 March 2013 3:09 AM

The more fuss we make about mothers, what with all those soppy cards and special Mothering Sunday lunches in restaurants, the less we seem to want them to bring up their own children.

The view seems to be that it’s just about all right for women to give birth, but after that can we please separate them from their young as soon as possible, for the sake of the economy?

New Labour was frank about it, with that terrifying commissar Patricia Hewitt describing the dwindling numbers of full-time mothers as a ‘problem’.

The Lib Dems’ chief feminist, Lynne Featherstone, says with her usual simple-minded bluntness that having a baby is a ‘bit of a setback’, adding that: ‘One of the main barriers to full equality in the UK is the fact women still have babies.’

The Coalition wants 40 per cent of two-year-olds in day care by next year. The shiny Modern Tory Liz Truss (I can’t call her a conservative) hires a costly nanny for her own children but wants the less wealthy to stuff their progeny into baby farms with industrial staff-to-toddler ratios.

Even the Leftist Polly Toynbee, who has nothing in principle against nationalising childcare, describes the Truss plan as ‘warehousing’.

Nobody ever questions the claim that it is automatically good for mothers to go out and be wage-slaves. Once, this idea was widely hated, and every self-respecting man worked as hard as he could to free his wife from the workbench.

Then the feminist revolutionaries began to argue that the home was a prison and marriage was penal servitude, chained to a sink. Most people thought that was nuts – until big business realised that women were cheaper than men, more reliable than men and much less likely to go on strike or be hungover than men.

So suddenly the wildest anti-male ravings of the ultras became the standard view of the CBI, the political parties and the agony aunts. And off the women trooped, to their call centres, their offices and their assembly plants, choking back tears as they crammed their toddlers into subsidised nurseries.

They got tax-breaks. Fatherless households got welfare subsidies. So as far as the State was concerned, the one arrangement that was discriminated against – and hard – was the one where one parent went out to work and the other stayed at home.

A selfish upper crust of female lawyers, professional politicians, bankers and journalists imagined that all women enjoyed work as much as they did – when the truth is that most do it to pay the bills.

But this self-satisfied clique was and is very influential. Who, in Parliament, law, business or the media, speaks for full-time mothers? Certainly not the steely, suited superwomen who have done very well out of the sex war.

Does all this matter? Well, I suspect it does. Children need parents, and small children badly need the devoted, unstinting personal attention that only a mother can give. Without it, they will grow physically but they will not flourish as fully developed humans.

If you wonder where those feral teenagers came from, or why so many primary school children can barely talk and are not potty-trained, ask yourself if it might not be connected with the abolition of motherhood.

But surely Scandinavia, the home of mass day care, is a paradise? Well, not if you believe Swedish sociologist Jonas Himmelstrand, who last week warned psychological disorders have tripled among children in Sweden since the child-rearing revolution there in the Eighties.

Culture can’t be transferred from one generation to the next when children are left to bring each other up. He says of mass day care: ‘It is at the root of bullying, teenage gangs, promiscuity and the flat-lining of culture.’

As usual, we have been warned. As usual, we will not take any notice until it is far too late. For no political party stands up for private life or the independent family.

*******

Every few
years a sort of blue mist blurs the vision of the dwindling battalions
of Tory loyalists. They persuade themselves that some more or less
fraudulent person is the new hope of the future.

Facts
are ignored. Blind faith is deployed. From this came the wild and
comically wrong belief that David Cameron was a secret patriot, who
would rip off his green, liberal garments when he assumed office.

Well,
we know how that worked out. But, learning nothing from the experience,
the poor old Tory Tribe are now looking for a new delusion to cling to.

Some
are beguiled by Alexander (alias ‘Boris’) Johnson. They don’t even know
his real name, and have also failed to notice that he is politically
correct, pro-EU and, while he is cleverer than his schoolmate and fellow
Bullingdon hearty, Mr Slippery, he is the same sort of thing.

But dafter even than that is the cult of Theresa May, now being hawked about as the New Iron Lady.

Oh,
come on. Theresa May is the Marshmallow Lady. She U-turned over
militant feminism, switching without explanation from opposing all-women
shortlists for parliamentary candidates to supporting them.

She worked happily with Harriet Harman over the passage of the horrible Equality Act.

And
as for her non-pledge to put withdrawal from the Human Rights
Convention ‘on the table’ if the Tories win the next Election, what’s
that worth?

‘On
the table’ doesn’t mean she will do it. And the Tories will lose the
next Election anyway. As a statement of intent, it is like that fine old
music-hall chorus: ‘If we had some ham, we could have some ham and
eggs, if we had some eggs.’

The awful Huhne case shows how driving cars brings out the worst in all of us.

Perfectly
pleasant people, once in control of a ton of steel and glass, become
irrational, arrogant, impatient speed-maniacs muttering ‘get out of my
way’ and buying personalised number plates.

How much time did Chris Huhne save by his speeding? What did he do with it? He has plenty now.

As
I ride my bicycle, I notice the steady worsening of manners on the
roads, more hooting, more violent swerving, more red lights jumped, more
mad texting while driving.

The people involved are probably saints at home or at work, but become fiends and morons once at the wheel.

It's started. The Coalition is breaking up, as I predicted here in September 2011.

Get
ready for a noisy Tory minority government, all mouth and no trousers,
designed to fool you into thinking they’ve rediscovered their
principles.

I gather that the wrongly imprisoned
police officer April Casburn, convicted on some of the flimsiest
evidence I’ve ever seen, will not be appealing.

What
a pity. I should have thought the Police Federation would be anxious
to protect its members from the danger of such prosecutions, and would
want to press the matter even if Mrs Casburn is reluctant.

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03 March 2012 6:31 PM

Here are the most sinister and hopeless words I have ever read: ‘I was told that we now live in a different time and some things are not to be said.’ They should be carved on the tombstone of the Country Formerly Known as Great Britain.

They are as near as we will get to an exact moment at which it became clear our free, happy past is gone for ever.

We grew up in another country, and because we did not guard it, or even see the danger, we have lost it, and our children will live in a censored twilight.

They were spoken – apparently by a police officer – to David Jones, author of the Fireman Sam books. Mr Jones had been detained for speaking words that only a stone-faced totalitarian, wholly devoid of a sense of humour or proportion, could have objected to.

Here are the words: ‘If I was wearing this scarf over my face, I wonder what would happen.’

Here is the context. Mr Jones was passing through the officious farce known as airport security, in which surly persons pretend to watch out for terrorists, and we pretend to take them seriously. A Muslim woman wearing a face veil had gone through the screen ahead of Mr Jones, had not set off the alarm, and had not been stopped.

Mr Jones’s artificial hip (that well-known terrorist weapon) had caused the machine to bleep and so the law-abiding, respectable, 67-year-old former fireman was humiliated with a stupid search which (as always) revealed nothing.

I go through this stuff quite a lot, including an exciting new machine that allows security personnel to view my naked body, and good luck to them. Though its moronic futility fills me with rage, I have learned to suppress it (at one Texas airport, there is a recorded announcement warning that it is an offence to make jokes about security).

I also know, because I read and hear so many stories, just how the Equality and Diversity Inquisition is rapidly turning into a full-on Thought Police in workplaces, schools and public buildings. Sooner or later, they are going to get me too. At this rate, I think it will be sooner.

What Mr Jones was actually doing was to behave like a free man, instead of the cowed subject of a monitored surveillance state in which most of what we think can no longer be said, and every miserable snitch, snoop and sneak has the power to ruin his neighbour’s life.

I’ll carry on defying it for as long as I can, but how long will that be?

Children must come first - no matter how clever you are

No British politician would have dared to say this revolting thing – though it’s what they think – but the Danish premier, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, can.

She thinks it a waste of well-educated women to bring up their own children.

Ms Thorning-Schmidt, daughter-in-law of Neil and Glenys Kinnock, believes paid strangers do a much better job of bringing up children than high-powered persons such as her. And so that is what must happen.

What a fool. When she is a forgotten footnote in a book of Danish history, her children will live on, never having experienced the special and undivided selfless attention that only a parent can give to a child.

Raising the next generation is a far more responsible and important task than being the chief executive of a minor Euro-province which is mainly governed from Brussels anyway. The more educated the parent is, the better she (or he if you like) will do that job.

And then perhaps she might wonder, as she looks back on her life, if all the Cabinet meetings and pictures of herself standing next to Angela Merkel are any compensation for the fact that her children grew up without her.

Have you noticed how the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are trying to pretend they hate each other? Like almost everything in public life these days, it’s a fake.

But both parties are worried that their collaboration has lost them voters. So watch out for a completely made-up row between them, probably over

Lords reform, followed by a Lib Dem ‘walkout’ from the Coalition. Nick Clegg will then go off to be a Euro Commissioner, a post that falls vacant in 2014. Vince Cable will probably take over his party.

Thanks to the creepy Fixed Term Parliament Act, which passed almost in silence, this walkout will not and cannot trigger a General Election. The new law means that the sort of no-confidence vote that brought down Jim Callaghan in 1979 can never happen again, a grave blow to our freedom.

So Mr Cameron will be able to stay at Downing Street at the head of a minority Tory Government.

The two parties will pelt each other with rhetorical mud and slime, the Tories will table all kinds of Right-wing legislation they know will never get through, and David Cameron will buy off his key rebels with ministerial jobs vacated by Liberals.

This pantomime could easily end in another Lib-Con coalition, or even a Lib-Lab coalition that will be exactly the same, but with different teeth and hair. But it will work only if you, the voters, are fooled by it.

So millions of people can’t do simple sums? Of course they can’t. This is because so many snotty teachers, who think proper education is ‘authoritarian’ and ‘learning by rote’, refuse to make children chant their times tables.

I am no mathematician, but got every single one of the test questions right with ease, simply by using my tables.

18 September 2011 11:10 AM

Many modern radicals sneer that my warnings of coming chaos are ‘moral panic’. They say that I exaggerate the problem, that Britain remains a perfectly civilised country with nothing much to worry about.

This is the politically correct view. Yet it cannot easily be squared with a dispiriting report this week on the treatment of disabled people.

The survey was made by the HQ of Political Correctness, the Equality and Human Rights Commission. It concerns a group of people that Political Correctness claims to care about.

And it shows that our treatment of many such people, especially those who look or sound a bit different from the rest of us, is as cruel and cold as the Stone Age.

More importantly, it shows that the authorities, for all their phoney concern and oily mission statements, couldn’t care less if some poor creature is persecuted and driven mad by scorn and mockery.

It deals at length with the unspeakably nasty case of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Frankie Hardwick.

Fiona Pilkington appealed more than 30 times to the police for help as her house was besieged and attacked, and her poor child mocked and terrified.

There was no place of safety where they could feel secure, let alone happy. In the end, she went mad with grief and fear, and incinerated her daughter and herself in her car - a death so horrible that we can only wonder how ghastly their lives had been.

That is all bad enough. The uselessness of the police in such matters is well known to anyone who really needs them.

But most striking are the words of one of their leading tormentors: ‘We can do anything we like and you can’t do anything about it.’

He was quite right. The evil are always quick to realise it, when authority has departed.

For what the report adds is that the general attitude of our many officials, agencies, helplines and services towards this problem is one of total defeatism.

Perhaps most telling of all are these words from the EHRC’s report: ‘Public authorities sometimes focused on the victim’s behaviour and suggested uncalled-for restrictions to their lives to avoid harassment rather than dealing with the perpetrators.’

Once again, our system lacks any moral distinction between right or wrong.

It is not outraged by human cruelty and filled with a burning desire to end it.

It sees its job as negotiating between the victim and the ‘offender’, whose behaviour is explained and excused by poverty or abuse.

This never works. Its failure was on show to the world when the feral multitude swarmed on to the streets of England a few weeks ago.

The people who hounded Fiona Pilkington and Frankie Hardwick to death would do the same to anyone who appeared different, or weak.

They have already begun on the old, a category to which most of us will sooner or later belong.

There are more of them every day, thanks to our unchanging and hopelessly wrong policies on family, education and justice.

This is not moral panic. It is the sober truth.

How about a blockbuster lauding full-time mothers?

The blitzkrieg against full-time mothers continues. Now we have a greatly hyped film, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, of the greatly hyped book I Don’t Know How She Does It, about some businesswoman or other who holds down an office job and has children, and they miraculously don’t starve or freeze to death or burn the house down in her absence.

I think we are supposed to admire this. But actually we do know how she does it. She hires a foreign nanny (or if enormously rich, a British one).

Politicians whose wives go out to work do this, too, but media organisations, likewise crammed with wage-slave mothers, never refer to the presence of an expensive servant. All that is supposed to have gone out with Downton Abbey. The wives involved are written about as if they do it all themselves.

No doubt this is all very well for the super-rich. Many children of such households develop enviably close relationships with the nanny, whom they see far more than their actual parent.

High-flying office work is fun, and it pays enough for tolerable childcare. But for hundreds of thousands driven to boring work to pay the bills, the work is not fun and the childcare, in crammed day-orphanages, is inadequate and sad.

I don’t know why we put up with it. Why is it still considered shaming and bad for a woman to bring up her own children?

A stroll through modern Britain

It is a sunny morning in a modest suburban shopping street I have known for years. I open the door of one of the newly refurbished public lavatories and find a couple busy together on the floor. I close it gently, wondering why they didn’t even bother to bolt it.

Further down the street, a group of young women with pushchairs are screaming furiously at a menacing young man who looks as if he is going to attack them.

The staider citizens simply walk round this scene. They long ago learned not to intervene. Scowling teenagers whizz aggressively up and down the pavements on bicycles. There is no sign of authority; in fact I haven’t seen a police foot patrol there since the Eighties, if then.

It is funny that many other countries have a more special relationship with the USA than we do. If you fly to the USA from Dublin airport, you can go through U.S. immigration before you board your plane (a service also available in Canada).

This saves you getting stuck behind 500 suspected Colombian drug smugglers at Miami or JFK. If we’re so special, why can’t we have this too?

The BBC’s Chief Commissar for Political Correctness (whom I imagine as a tall, stern young woman in cruel glasses issuing edicts from an austere office) was hard at work again last week.

On University Challenge, Jeremy Paxman referred to a date as being Common Era, rather than AD. This nasty formulation is designed to write Christianity out of our culture. Given the allegedly ferocious Mr Paxman’s schoolgirlish, groupie-like treatment of various prominent atheists in recent interviews, maybe he favours this far-from-impartial view.

Then on Thursday morning, the Today programme’s Justin Webb referred to a ‘multi-billion-euro’ project to build a space telescope.

It’s touching, in a way, that deep in the BBC they still believe in the wretched and disastrous single currency. But why couldn’t he have used pounds?

The figure wasn’t precise; the meaning would have been the same. I expect it was for the same reason that the BBC now incessantly uses the metric system instead of customary British measures, often making hilarious mistakes as a result. My favourite remains the day when Lionel Kelleway, distinguished presenter of natural history programmes, announced that some cliffs (actually 600 feet high) were 2,000 metres high (6,560 feet).